Reluctantly went to A&E today after twisting my knee playing football last week. I've been hobbling ever since and whilst it has been getting better I wasn't even able to turn the pedal twice on a static bike. Wanted to get an X-Ray just to make sure there was nothing fractured before taking any other action.
Arrived, spoke to receptionist, triaged, spoke to doc, got x-ray, spoke to doc again, left. Total time - less than 1 hour. Bravo.
Did you time travel back to 1963? Watch out for the snow.
The think tank idea to cap ISAs at a £100k lifetime allowance seems completely mad to me. It seems like an idea designed to destroy what little saving and investment culture that exists in the country. Surely a wealth tax that includes ISAs would work better, raise more money and not discourage people from investing, in fact it would increase risk appetite so investment gains covered the tax.
Sometimes I wonder whether these think tank policy wonks actually live in the real world. But then I remember they probably all did PPE at Oxford and went to Eton so they don't.
Once again you open your mouth without removing the silver spoon. 90% plus of the population will be lucky to ever get 4 figures in an ISA never mind £100K.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
The think tank idea to cap ISAs at a £100k lifetime allowance seems completely mad to me. It seems like an idea designed to destroy what little saving and investment culture that exists in the country. Surely a wealth tax that includes ISAs would work better, raise more money and not discourage people from investing, in fact it would increase risk appetite so investment gains covered the tax.
Sometimes I wonder whether these think tank policy wonks actually live in the real world. But then I remember they probably all did PPE at Oxford and went to Eton so they don't.
Once again you open your mouth without removing the silver spoon. 90% plus of the population will be lucky to ever get 4 figures in an ISA never mind £100K.
People with four figures in an ISA aren't going to be the target of a wealth tax.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
Certainly not going to disagree with more housing and more equal income distributions.
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
It seems those people hyper-ventilating about Gender Recognition Certificates should be more concerned about Police Warant Cards.
No they should not , they should be just as worried that yet another group of men have access to women's safe places..
Hi @malcolmg Will you be welcoming Rishi's decision to strike down the legislation?
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
Time limited planning permission - if you don’t start the development you lose the permission.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
It seems those people hyper-ventilating about Gender Recognition Certificates should be more concerned about Police Warant Cards.
No they should not , they should be just as worried that yet another group of men have access to women's safe places..
Hi @malcolmg Will you be welcoming Rishi's decision to strike down the legislation?
YES, even though it should be none of England's business as we should be independent. It would never have happened in that case as Sturgeon would have known it was political suicide. This way she has a good excuse as usual.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
Time limited planning permission - if you don’t start the development you lose the permission.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
I like both of those. Not something I had considered. I suppose the problem would be enforcement and loopholes. What you don't want is to make it so suitable land which has been given permission cannot then be developed. Better to hit them in the pocket and make the land a cost burden to them if they do not develop it.
Some interesting nuances in the details. People not too bothered about Sunak's health care while not thinking he's very good, overwhelmingly think the Government is to blame over the NHS, support the strikes, but also support minimum cover, while not going as far as sacking staff who refuse to give it - rather (marginally) fining the unions. I don't agree with some of that but it's good to see people don't just give knee-jerk responses on one side or the other.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
Certainly not going to disagree with more housing and more equal income distributions.
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
Plenty of people receiving housing benefit live in HMOs (most people under 35 can only claim the cost of a room in a shared house under the rules). Plenty of HMOs can be converted into large single family homes, in fact I believe our own 6 bedroom house used to be an HMO before the previous owners had it. Plus you have eg professionals sharing flats who could afford a flat each if prices were lower. And lots of professionals live in ex council flats - that's how my wife and I got on the housing ladder. The purpose of housing benefit/the housing component of UC is to make consumption (including of housing) more equal than the underlying income distribution allows for, take it away and it becomes less equal, that's the reality.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
The litigant is the client not the counsel. Barristers can’t be labelled vexatious litigants in respect of cases they act in (as opposed to ones they bring in their own name) but they can be disbarred etc.
This is all wrong. The GLP was a party to this case; Maugham was a witness and effectively a party. He was represented by David Lock KC.
Click through to one of the witness statements to confirm the parties to the action.
The statute relating to vexatious litigants is section 42 of the Senior Courts Act 1981. It says that the High Court any “person” (whether natural or legal) instituting vexatious proceedings then it may be stopped from doing so. The “person” in this instance is the Good Law Project, not Joylon. The AG would have to show that Joylon personally instituted proceedings under s42(1)(a) rather than GLP. That would require piercing the corporate veil to an extent that no corporation would ever use the English legal system again for fear of what would happen to the directors. And a witness is not “effectively a party” to the proceedings in any legal sense.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
Time limited planning permission - if you don’t start the development you lose the permission.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
I like both of those. Not something I had considered. I suppose the problem would be enforcement and loopholes. What you don't want is to make it so suitable land which has been given permission cannot then be developed. Better to hit them in the pocket and make the land a cost burden to them if they do not develop it.
Planning permission tax. Planning permission for site over X in size has a tax per acre, collected by the council.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
Not sure what you mean by "handing it out semi-randomly". There is nothing "semi-random" about Zelenskiy's urgent plea for heavy armour.
We were discussing the awarding of the post of Defence Minister.
Scholz appears about to appoint someone politically convenient, as opposed to choosing the best person for the job.
I see. Though, perhaps, not the best context for the jibe about Tory cabinets, given that Ben Wallace is the UK defence secretary...
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
Time limited planning permission - if you don’t start the development you lose the permission.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
I like both of those. Not something I had considered. I suppose the problem would be enforcement and loopholes. What you don't want is to make it so suitable land which has been given permission cannot then be developed. Better to hit them in the pocket and make the land a cost burden to them if they do not develop it.
Charge council tax, at the unoccupied rate, from the moment planing permission is given. Doubling every year the development isn’t handed over to residents.
Make PP much easier to obtain, and give LAs financial incentives to allow more housebuilding in their area - something like central government doubling grants for five years, for new builds. In a perfect world, allow much more LA revenue to be raised locally rather than distributed centrally.
Whatever you do, don’t let local authorities own residential property. That gives them an ‘asset’ on their books, and every incentive to maximise the book value of such asset.
Central government should also be innovative behind the scenes, doing things like ensuring easy access to mortgages for modern pre-fab housing units and self-builders.
Neighbors who saw a toddler in diapers wandering around a Beech Grove, Indiana, apartment complex with a loaded handgun called police. The incident was caught on building cameras. The father - who lied that he didn’t own a gun - was arrested. https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1614727097616072706
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Until the Synod decides in favour of same sex marriages, and Canon Law is amended to that effect, thus triggering a change in statute law, there will be no "flying Bishops" as same sex marriages will be illegal in Church of England churches.
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Weird private sects can bless who they like, but the state religion should treat everyone equally, and respect human rights.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
Time limited planning permission - if you don’t start the development you lose the permission.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
I like both of those. Not something I had considered. I suppose the problem would be enforcement and loopholes. What you don't want is to make it so suitable land which has been given permission cannot then be developed. Better to hit them in the pocket and make the land a cost burden to them if they do not develop it.
There is legislative precedent that planning permission (which is already timed to expire if no "meaningful start" is made in a given time period) may be maintained by a "meaningful start" as limited as digging one small trench.
Should it be apparent that no intent existed to go beyond that point in the given time period, it does not matter; planning permission is retained long-term (judged thus in court with precedent being given from that).
It's very frustrating as a councillor, seeing such things happen and watching land be bought and sold "with planning permission" repeatedly over a period of several years. And, of course, up until recently, the fact no houses are put on such land does impact your five-year-land-supply, meaning that the less scrupulous developers can ignore whole swathes of the Local Plan and need for infrastructure and apply for permission pretty much anywhere.
And get any refusal overturned all-but-automatically due to no five year land supply. And then lock it in by digging a trench, buy and sell (etc), and between them, control the rate of building out to deliberately keep prices high.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
The litigant is the client not the counsel. Barristers can’t be labelled vexatious litigants in respect of cases they act in (as opposed to ones they bring in their own name) but they can be disbarred etc.
This is all wrong. The GLP was a party to this case; Maugham was a witness and effectively a party. He was represented by David Lock KC.
Click through to one of the witness statements to confirm the parties to the action.
The statute relating to vexatious litigants is section 42 of the Senior Courts Act 1981. It says that the High Court any “person” (whether natural or legal) instituting vexatious proceedings then it may be stopped from doing so. The “person” in this instance is the Good Law Project, not Joylon. The AG would have to show that Joylon personally instituted proceedings under s42(1)(a) rather than GLP. That would require piercing the corporate veil to an extent that no corporation would ever use the English legal system again for fear of what would happen to the directors. And a witness is not “effectively a party” to the proceedings in any legal sense.
I did not say the fact of him being a witness made him effectively a party, I said he was both; not the one, therefore the other. You started from the belly flopping factual error of thinking he was counsel in this case, which he incontrovertibly is not, and are now trying to obfuscate the point with some pettifogging nonsense. Yes, the order would be against GLP not Joly boy, well done, award yourself half a point.
Mind you, I wouldn't bet 2p against a court finding that the person controlling a corporate body was instituting proceedings if he caused that body to issue proceedings.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
Certainly not going to disagree with more housing and more equal income distributions.
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
Plenty of people receiving housing benefit live in HMOs (most people under 35 can only claim the cost of a room in a shared house under the rules). Plenty of HMOs can be converted into large single family homes, in fact I believe our own 6 bedroom house used to be an HMO before the previous owners had it. Plus you have eg professionals sharing flats who could afford a flat each if prices were lower. And lots of professionals live in ex council flats - that's how my wife and I got on the housing ladder. The purpose of housing benefit/the housing component of UC is to make consumption (including of housing) more equal than the underlying income distribution allows for, take it away and it becomes less equal, that's the reality.
It is a very ineffecient way of redistribution imo, and the side effect of improving the wealth of the voting landlord class, of which MPs are disproportionately in, is neither accidental nor desirable.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Until the Synod decides in favour of same sex marriages, and Canon Law is amended to that effect, thus triggering a change in the laws of the land, there will be no "flying Bishops" as same sex marriages will be illegal in Church of England churches.
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
The point being that it will only likely pass with the flying bishops included for the evangelical Parishes and a few Anglo Catholic Parishes which oppose same sex marriage
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
Time limited planning permission - if you don’t start the development you lose the permission.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
I like both of those. Not something I had considered. I suppose the problem would be enforcement and loopholes. What you don't want is to make it so suitable land which has been given permission cannot then be developed. Better to hit them in the pocket and make the land a cost burden to them if they do not develop it.
There is legislative precedent that planning permission (which is already timed to expire if no "meaningful start" is made in a given time period) may be maintained by a "meaningful start" as limited as digging one small trench.
Should it be apparent that no intent existed to go beyond that point in the given time period, it does not matter; planning permission is retained long-term (judged thus in court with precedent being given from that).
It's very frustrating as a councillor, seeing such things happen and watching land be bought and sold "with planning permission" repeatedly over a period of several years. And, of course, up until recently, the fact no houses are put on such land does impact your five-year-land-supply, meaning that the less scrupulous developers can ignore whole swathes of the Local Plan and need for infrastructure and apply for permission pretty much anywhere.
And get any refusal overturned all-but-automatically due to no five year land supply. And then lock it in by digging a trench, buy and sell (etc), and between them, control the rate of building out to deliberately keep prices high.
Plus, of course, Local Authorities are so strapped for cash that they have only a small handful of Planning Enforcement Officers. And making enforcement cases against developers who haven't fulfilled their obligations (such as provision of infrastructure, or causing significant issues with crap infrastructure) also faces an uphill battle to begin with.
Which breeds NIMBYism. This is completely rational, if you see that planning permission for new houses DOESN'T bring down prices (as developers ration the building to keep them up), that developers get to make money hand over fist, and that obligations and conditions placed upon them turn out to be not worth the paper they're written on.
A draft of the government-ordered report finds that Sadiq Khan did not follow due process and that Dick was unfairly treated, branding the mayor’s actions and decision-making as “irrational” and “unreasonable”.
A furious Khan is consulting lawyers, and believes the report to be biased and factually flawed. The report also says the mayor’s treatment of Dick was “oppressive”, and that she was placed under unfair pressure...
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
It seems those people hyper-ventilating about Gender Recognition Certificates should be more concerned about Police Warant Cards.
No they should not , they should be just as worried that yet another group of men have access to women's safe places..
Hi @malcolmg Will you be welcoming Rishi's decision to strike down the legislation?
YES, even though it should be none of England's business as we should be independent. It would never have happened in that case as Sturgeon would have known it was political suicide. This way she has a good excuse as usual.
You do realise that IndyScotland will be Wokey-Heaven with the current lot in charge. You may need to emigrate.
String of allegations against him during his time on the force - and it wasn't the Met who finally caught him, but Hertforshire.
The rapes were mostly committed in Hertfordshire and therefore, presumably, investigated by Hertfordshire police and not the Met, so I'm not sure we should give them too many plaudits for taking a decade to track down a serial rapist with dozens of victims.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
The litigant is the client not the counsel. Barristers can’t be labelled vexatious litigants in respect of cases they act in (as opposed to ones they bring in their own name) but they can be disbarred etc.
This is all wrong. The GLP was a party to this case; Maugham was a witness and effectively a party. He was represented by David Lock KC.
Click through to one of the witness statements to confirm the parties to the action.
The statute relating to vexatious litigants is section 42 of the Senior Courts Act 1981. It says that the High Court any “person” (whether natural or legal) instituting vexatious proceedings then it may be stopped from doing so. The “person” in this instance is the Good Law Project, not Joylon. The AG would have to show that Joylon personally instituted proceedings under s42(1)(a) rather than GLP. That would require piercing the corporate veil to an extent that no corporation would ever use the English legal system again for fear of what would happen to the directors. And a witness is not “effectively a party” to the proceedings in any legal sense.
I did not say the fact of him being a witness made him effectively a party, I said he was both; not the one, therefore the other. You started from the belly flopping factual error of thinking he was counsel in this case, which he incontrovertibly is not, and are now trying to obfuscate the point with some pettifogging nonsense. Yes, the order would be against GLP not Joly boy, well done, award yourself half a point.
Mind you, I wouldn't bet 2p against a court finding that the person controlling a corporate body was instituting proceedings if he caused that body to issue proceedings.
2 corporate entities bring vexatious claims. Judge identifies Individual controlling both of them, makes him a party to the case, makes indemnity costs order against him and declares him vexatious litigant.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
That doesn't make sense. It only matters if you want to get married in a CoE church. But you would only want to do that surely if you were a believer in God and member of the CoE. If you are gay and want to get married in a CoE church which doesn't recognise or value your relationship, then you are a queer fish indeed.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Until the Synod decides in favour of same sex marriages, and Canon Law is amended to that effect, thus triggering a change in the laws of the land, there will be no "flying Bishops" as same sex marriages will be illegal in Church of England churches.
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
The point being that it will only likely pass with the flying bishops included for the evangelical Parishes and a few Anglo Catholic Parishes which oppose same sex marriage
Frankly, it's astonishing that Dick was allowed to continue as long as she did. The Home Office seem to have been determined not to notice how rotten the Met was.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
You see where HYUFD says Old Testament, Pauline view, above? Notice any rather prominent individual whose view is omitted?
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Until the Synod decides in favour of same sex marriages, and Canon Law is amended to that effect, thus triggering a change in the laws of the land, there will be no "flying Bishops" as same sex marriages will be illegal in Church of England churches.
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
The point being that it will only likely pass with the flying bishops included for the evangelical Parishes and a few Anglo Catholic Parishes which oppose same sex marriage
I don't know what that means.
There are flying Bishops now like the Bishops of Beverley and Ebbsfleet for Parishes which don't want women priests or bishops
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Until the Synod decides in favour of same sex marriages, and Canon Law is amended to that effect, thus triggering a change in the laws of the land, there will be no "flying Bishops" as same sex marriages will be illegal in Church of England churches.
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
The point being that it will only likely pass with the flying bishops included for the evangelical Parishes and a few Anglo Catholic Parishes which oppose same sex marriage
I don't know what that means.
Flying bishops are sort of locum, supply bishops pandering to the prejudices of the prejudiced.
In Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder goes to Oxford he is told to steer clear of the Anglo Catholics as they are "all sodomites with unpleasant accents" so change of heart there apparently.
String of allegations against him during his time on the force - and it wasn't the Met who finally caught him, but Hertforshire.
The rapes were mostly committed in Hertfordshire and therefore, presumably, investigated by Hertfordshire police and not the Met, so I'm not sure we should give them too many plaudits for taking a decade to track down a serial rapist with dozens of victims.
I'm not giving anyone any plaudits. But reportedly the Met had received numerous complaints regarding him.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Until the Synod decides in favour of same sex marriages, and Canon Law is amended to that effect, thus triggering a change in the laws of the land, there will be no "flying Bishops" as same sex marriages will be illegal in Church of England churches.
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
The point being that it will only likely pass with the flying bishops included for the evangelical Parishes and a few Anglo Catholic Parishes which oppose same sex marriage
I don't know what that means.
There are flying Bishops now like the Bishops of Beverley and Ebbsfleet for Parishes which don't want women priests or bishops
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
Given the discussion to this point was concerning housing not large scale infrastructure projects, planning reform is almost entirely unnecessary in that area. If you want to get more houses built then start getting the developers to actually build houses on the land that already has planning permission. And enforce the requirement for a much higher number of social houses within those permissions. Rather than letting developers back out of commitments once permission has been given.
Time limited planning permission - if you don’t start the development you lose the permission.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
I like both of those. Not something I had considered. I suppose the problem would be enforcement and loopholes. What you don't want is to make it so suitable land which has been given permission cannot then be developed. Better to hit them in the pocket and make the land a cost burden to them if they do not develop it.
There is legislative precedent that planning permission (which is already timed to expire if no "meaningful start" is made in a given time period) may be maintained by a "meaningful start" as limited as digging one small trench.
Should it be apparent that no intent existed to go beyond that point in the given time period, it does not matter; planning permission is retained long-term (judged thus in court with precedent being given from that).
It's very frustrating as a councillor, seeing such things happen and watching land be bought and sold "with planning permission" repeatedly over a period of several years. And, of course, up until recently, the fact no houses are put on such land does impact your five-year-land-supply, meaning that the less scrupulous developers can ignore whole swathes of the Local Plan and need for infrastructure and apply for permission pretty much anywhere.
And get any refusal overturned all-but-automatically due to no five year land supply. And then lock it in by digging a trench, buy and sell (etc), and between them, control the rate of building out to deliberately keep prices high.
Would it be possible to charge 200% Council Tax on land which has planning permission, but no houses? (In the same way as some councils do for empty/2nd home properties?). That way at least there is a cost to them of having land with planning permission but not building on it?
Frankly, it's astonishing that Dick was allowed to continue as long as she did. The Home Office seem to have been determined not to notice how rotten the Met was.
On what was publicly known she should have ages ago. There was always going to be more under wraps.
Frankly, it's astonishing that Dick was allowed to continue as long as she did. The Home Office seem to have been determined not to notice how rotten the Met was.
On what was publicly known she should have ages ago. There was always going to be more under wraps.
One thing the otherwise lamentable Sadiq Khan has got completely right was making forcing Cressida Dick to resign. She was a stain on this great city and the Met became more crooked and unaccountable than ever under her watch.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
Certainly not going to disagree with more housing and more equal income distributions.
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
Plenty of people receiving housing benefit live in HMOs (most people under 35 can only claim the cost of a room in a shared house under the rules). Plenty of HMOs can be converted into large single family homes, in fact I believe our own 6 bedroom house used to be an HMO before the previous owners had it. Plus you have eg professionals sharing flats who could afford a flat each if prices were lower. And lots of professionals live in ex council flats - that's how my wife and I got on the housing ladder. The purpose of housing benefit/the housing component of UC is to make consumption (including of housing) more equal than the underlying income distribution allows for, take it away and it becomes less equal, that's the reality.
It is a very ineffecient way of redistribution imo, and the side effect of improving the wealth of the voting landlord class, of which MPs are disproportionately in, is neither accidental nor desirable.
As I see it, the key thing about housing benefit/the housing component of UC - and the reason it exists as a separate benefit rather than being treated simply as a support to income which is what it is - is that the rate differs according to local housing costs. If you abolished it as a separate benefit you'd have to bump up UC otherwise people would starve - they'd still have to pay rent somewhere and it's not free anywhere. But you could set that at an amount that allows people to live only in the cheapest areas of the country. That would need to be higher than current rent levels in those areas because rents there would go up as eg Merthyr filled up with poor Londoners. In my opinion that would lead to worse outcomes than currently - landlords in Merthyr would be quids in apart from anything else as they reaped the capital gain - but as I understand it that is your proposal.
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
Until the Synod decides in favour of same sex marriages, and Canon Law is amended to that effect, thus triggering a change in the laws of the land, there will be no "flying Bishops" as same sex marriages will be illegal in Church of England churches.
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
The point being that it will only likely pass with the flying bishops included for the evangelical Parishes and a few Anglo Catholic Parishes which oppose same sex marriage
I don't know what that means.
Flying bishops are sort of locum, supply bishops pandering to the prejudices of the prejudiced.
In Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder goes to Oxford he is told to steer clear of the Anglo Catholics as they are "all sodomites with unpleasant accents" so change of heart there apparently.
To be fair Anglo Catholics are more anti women priests than anti homosexual marriage, while evangelicals are more anti homosexual marriage than anti women priests.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who rarely think about what's right and what's wrong. Some priests have much more moral sense than some estate agents, bankers, hedge fund managers, lawyers, quacks, and politicians. At least so I reckon. I'll judge that on each issue.)
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Planning permission ups the value of the land. So you could acquire agricultural land; do the legwork to obtain planning permission; get the permission then sell the land on to someone else for the new higher price
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
Certainly not going to disagree with more housing and more equal income distributions.
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
Plenty of people receiving housing benefit live in HMOs (most people under 35 can only claim the cost of a room in a shared house under the rules). Plenty of HMOs can be converted into large single family homes, in fact I believe our own 6 bedroom house used to be an HMO before the previous owners had it. Plus you have eg professionals sharing flats who could afford a flat each if prices were lower. And lots of professionals live in ex council flats - that's how my wife and I got on the housing ladder. The purpose of housing benefit/the housing component of UC is to make consumption (including of housing) more equal than the underlying income distribution allows for, take it away and it becomes less equal, that's the reality.
It is a very ineffecient way of redistribution imo, and the side effect of improving the wealth of the voting landlord class, of which MPs are disproportionately in, is neither accidental nor desirable.
As I see it, the key thing about housing benefit/the housing component of UC - and the reason it exists as a separate benefit rather than being treated simply as a support to income which is what it is - is that the rate differs according to local housing costs. If you abolished it as a separate benefit you'd have to bump up UC otherwise people would starve - they'd still have to pay rent somewhere and it's not free anywhere. But you could set that at an amount that allows people to live only in the cheapest areas of the country. That would need to be higher than current rent levels in those areas because rents there would go up as eg Merthyr filled up with poor Londoners. In my opinion that would lead to worse outcomes than currently - landlords in Merthyr would be quids in apart from anything else as they reaped the capital gain - but as I understand it that is your proposal.
Not a treasury minister or civil servant so I don't really have a proposal as such, but yes would like to see housing benefit cut significantly (not eliminated, and could be done over several years to minimise transitional impact) and quite happy for that money to be spent on a mix of reducing UC taper, increasing UC and perhaps increasing the zero tax bands for income tax and NI instead.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Obtaining planning permission increases the value of the land, and builders sometimes prefer to speculate that the value of the land will go up more so they wait rather than developing the property and selling it. Basically they are operating as land speculators rather than builders.
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Effort? Have you no idea how our spiv and rentier economy works?
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
It seems those people hyper-ventilating about Gender Recognition Certificates should be more concerned about Police Warant Cards.
No they should not , they should be just as worried that yet another group of men have access to women's safe places..
Hi @malcolmg Will you be welcoming Rishi's decision to strike down the legislation?
YES, even though it should be none of England's business as we should be independent. It would never have happened in that case as Sturgeon would have known it was political suicide. This way she has a good excuse as usual.
You do realise that IndyScotland will be Wokey-Heaven with the current lot in charge. You may need to emigrate.
They will not be in charge though, their days are numbered. Whether any other lot will be any better is debateable but as you say I could always emigrate. That would not happen unless daugher and grandsons came as well though. Doubt she would get rid of horses or dogs etc and boys settled so I would be stuck.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Two main reasons:
1. Capital appreciation of the land. Land with planning permission being worth considerably more than land without, and the uplift being significantly more than the cost of the permissions process. 2. A wish to control the supply of new housing, to drip out new houses over a period of time, rather than release a large amount of housing one year and none the next. Dripping the housing out over time reduces supply (and therefore increases price) at any particular point in time.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Sometimes to increase the value of the land, intending to sell it on, either immediately or later on (indeed there are people who make a living simply from buying land, securing permission and then selling on). Which they can take as a credit to the balance sheet regardless of any intention to progress. Sometimes to establish what they can build, saving time when they eventually have the ability and/or inclination to do so.
Once granted a planning permission is a precedent - and even if it lapses after five years of no action, if permission is applied for again for the same land, previous permissions can be cited as precedent even if they have lapsed. Essentially, once you have got permission to build a block of flats somewhere, the precedent of development is established - and of course you can always try to get approval for a more intensive set of plans later if you wish.
For a larger developer, having a 'bank' of sites already with permission allows them to manage workflow, proceeding with developments as and when they wish, reflecting future changes in value and hence profitability.
Getting a permission now is also 'insurance' against future changes to planning policy, future changes in administration at the council, and future attitudes to house building.
As an example, right now it is relatively easy to get permission to convert retail or hospitality premises into residential, because in the aftermath of the pandemic and now with the cost of living crisis, the financial viability of many shops, restaurants and hotels is in doubt and hence their value as going concerns is depressed. Whether this will still be the case in five years' time, who can say?
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage.
That's how it works in Germany. You can either make a bit of a do of the marriage registration, or you can quietly do the registration, then have a religious ceremony (or both). While the religious ceremony may be what people focus on, it has no meaning in the eyes of the law.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
'And thus spake Sunil unto his PB Disciples: "Know ye that the Lord God was never married to the mother of His only begotten son!"'
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
Certainly not going to disagree with more housing and more equal income distributions.
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
Plenty of people receiving housing benefit live in HMOs (most people under 35 can only claim the cost of a room in a shared house under the rules). Plenty of HMOs can be converted into large single family homes, in fact I believe our own 6 bedroom house used to be an HMO before the previous owners had it. Plus you have eg professionals sharing flats who could afford a flat each if prices were lower. And lots of professionals live in ex council flats - that's how my wife and I got on the housing ladder. The purpose of housing benefit/the housing component of UC is to make consumption (including of housing) more equal than the underlying income distribution allows for, take it away and it becomes less equal, that's the reality.
It is a very ineffecient way of redistribution imo, and the side effect of improving the wealth of the voting landlord class, of which MPs are disproportionately in, is neither accidental nor desirable.
As I see it, the key thing about housing benefit/the housing component of UC - and the reason it exists as a separate benefit rather than being treated simply as a support to income which is what it is - is that the rate differs according to local housing costs. If you abolished it as a separate benefit you'd have to bump up UC otherwise people would starve - they'd still have to pay rent somewhere and it's not free anywhere. But you could set that at an amount that allows people to live only in the cheapest areas of the country. That would need to be higher than current rent levels in those areas because rents there would go up as eg Merthyr filled up with poor Londoners. In my opinion that would lead to worse outcomes than currently - landlords in Merthyr would be quids in apart from anything else as they reaped the capital gain - but as I understand it that is your proposal.
Not a treasury minister or civil servant so I don't really have a proposal as such, but yes would like to see housing benefit cut significantly (not eliminated, and could be done over several years to minimise transitional impact) and quite happy for that money to be spent on a mix of reducing UC taper, increasing UC and perhaps increasing the zero tax bands for income tax and NI instead.
The problem I have with this proposal is that it will exacerbate the difference between rich and poor areas and make communities less economically diverse. Eg where I live in SE London is a mixture of fairly expensive single family homes and private and socially rented flats. A lot of the lats are in properties that used to be single family homes and can be converted back into such. If people on low incomes weren't subsidised to live in our community then it would become a lot wealthier on average. Property prices might well go up as the area became more "exclusive". But as someone who values living in a diverse community it would be sad. I'm not sure it would be a net positive for there to be more areas with far higher concentrations of poor people living in them, out of sight and mind of the middle class, either.
String of allegations against him during his time on the force - and it wasn't the Met who finally caught him, but Hertforshire.
The rapes were mostly committed in Hertfordshire and therefore, presumably, investigated by Hertfordshire police and not the Met, so I'm not sure we should give them too many plaudits for taking a decade to track down a serial rapist with dozens of victims.
I'm not giving anyone any plaudits. But reportedly the Met had received numerous complaints regarding him.
Even without complaints, the Metropolitan Police should surely be positively vetting the diplomatic and parliamentary group rozzers, partly because they are armed but also because the potential for terrorism is so high, yet both Couzens and Carrick went undetected.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Obtaining planning permission increases the value of the land, and builders sometimes prefer to speculate that the value of the land will go up more so they wait rather than developing the property and selling it. Basically they are operating as land speculators rather than builders.
In a theoretical perfect market any builder who was laggardly about building on land for which they had permission would lose market share to builders who got on with it. But in this case there is such a shortage of suitable development land that the big developers can effectively block the proper functioning of a free market.
There's only really three options here. Either you dramatically increase the supply of land by abolishing planning controls, you break the stranglehold the developers have on the market by introducing the state as a serious competitor, or you do something radical with the principle of property ownership (like forcing developers to sell land at a heavy discount to the price they paid for it if not developed within a reasonable period of receiving planning permission, or making all developments involve multiple developers, competing to finish building first in the same area, somehow) to otherwise introduce more competition into the building market.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Disestablishment sounds considerably simpler than a secular majority trying to instruct a religious minority in what the God they believe in intends the rules of their religion to be.
String of allegations against him during his time on the force - and it wasn't the Met who finally caught him, but Hertforshire.
The rapes were mostly committed in Hertfordshire and therefore, presumably, investigated by Hertfordshire police and not the Met, so I'm not sure we should give them too many plaudits for taking a decade to track down a serial rapist with dozens of victims.
I'm not giving anyone any plaudits. But reportedly the Met had received numerous complaints regarding him.
Even without complaints, the Metropolitan Police should surely be positively vetting the diplomatic and parliamentary group rozzers, partly because they are armed but also because the potential for terrorism is so high, yet both Couzens and Carrick went undetected.
The worry is that it is because their behaviour passes for normal, so it's a case of wondering how many good apples have survived being spoiled by the bad.
That said, I can't find out how large that group is, so I'm not sure how unlikely the coincidence of the two cases is.
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Obtaining planning permission increases the value of the land, and builders sometimes prefer to speculate that the value of the land will go up more so they wait rather than developing the property and selling it. Basically they are operating as land speculators rather than builders.
In a theoretical perfect market any builder who was laggardly about building on land for which they had permission would lose market share to builders who got on with it. But in this case there is such a shortage of suitable development land that the big developers can effectively block the proper functioning of a free market.
There's only really three options here. Either you dramatically increase the supply of land by abolishing planning controls, you break the stranglehold the developers have on the market by introducing the state as a serious competitor, or you do something radical with the principle of property ownership (like forcing developers to sell land at a heavy discount to the price they paid for it if not developed within a reasonable period of receiving planning permission, or making all developments involve multiple developers, competing to finish building first in the same area, somehow) to otherwise introduce more competition into the building market.
It could be possible to look at some sort of penalty or cost to holding land with unimplemented permissions, either directly through some sort of financial payment that has to be made to keep a permission alive, or by significantly shifting the planning rules so that if a plan isn't implemented any precedent value in it is lost.
If - as the government periodically tries to do - you remove most planning controls - that is no guarantee of a solution, if developers are holding onto prime sites that they own for internal or financial reasons.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Disestablishment sounds considerably simpler than a secular majority trying to instruct a religious minority in what the God they believe in intends the rules of their religion to be.
Very true but it is one of those things governments probably don't want to happen while they are in charge. Not a great look would be their thinking.
Then again, the Church of Wales has managed since 1920.
On housing costs in the Los Angeles area: Years ago I recall reading of a study of what had happened in the area after extensive "environmental" rules had been imposed. After that, it took an average of five years for a builder to get a permit through the bureaucracy.
That didn't stop building, but it did eliminate most small builders. Large companies could afford to look ahead and have a "pipeline" of permits. And, it turned out, according to the study, that price competition mostly came from the small builders.
(Did the rules improve the environment? The article didn't say. But, as the years have gone by, I have been more and more supportive of improving the environment -- and more and more skeptical of most proposals to do so.)
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Which is likely happening in the next year or two anyway
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Obtaining planning permission increases the value of the land, and builders sometimes prefer to speculate that the value of the land will go up more so they wait rather than developing the property and selling it. Basically they are operating as land speculators rather than builders.
In a theoretical perfect market any builder who was laggardly about building on land for which they had permission would lose market share to builders who got on with it. But in this case there is such a shortage of suitable development land that the big developers can effectively block the proper functioning of a free market.
There's only really three options here. Either you dramatically increase the supply of land by abolishing planning controls, you break the stranglehold the developers have on the market by introducing the state as a serious competitor, or you do something radical with the principle of property ownership (like forcing developers to sell land at a heavy discount to the price they paid for it if not developed within a reasonable period of receiving planning permission, or making all developments involve multiple developers, competing to finish building first in the same area, somehow) to otherwise introduce more competition into the building market.
It could be possible to look at some sort of penalty or cost to holding land with unimplemented permissions, either directly through some sort of financial payment that has to be made to keep a permission alive, or by significantly shifting the planning rules so that if a plan isn't implemented any precedent value in it is lost.
If - as the government periodically tries to do - you remove most planning controls - that is no guarantee of a solution, if developers are holding onto prime sites that they own for internal or financial reasons.
Presumably a general land tax would be a good incentive to develop land.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage.
That's how it works in Germany. You can either make a bit of a do of the marriage registration, or you can quietly do the registration, then have a religious ceremony (or both). While the religious ceremony may be what people focus on, it has no meaning in the eyes of the law.
The largest Church in Germany is now the Roman Catholic Church too
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Which is likely happening in the next year or two anyway
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Yes but I wouldn't worry what a seemingly dwindling congregation (which is smaller than the membership) of the CoE thinks about the price of eggs.
You are at the bottom of the well looking at this.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Russia?
Well the Eastern Orthodox Church is basically the Roman Catholic Church just with a Patriarch not Pope and even more ornate ceremony
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Which is likely happening in the next year or two anyway
Interesting. You think that the Synod will vote in favour of same sex marriage within a year or two?
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
Certainly not going to disagree with more housing and more equal income distributions.
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
Plenty of people receiving housing benefit live in HMOs (most people under 35 can only claim the cost of a room in a shared house under the rules). Plenty of HMOs can be converted into large single family homes, in fact I believe our own 6 bedroom house used to be an HMO before the previous owners had it. Plus you have eg professionals sharing flats who could afford a flat each if prices were lower. And lots of professionals live in ex council flats - that's how my wife and I got on the housing ladder. The purpose of housing benefit/the housing component of UC is to make consumption (including of housing) more equal than the underlying income distribution allows for, take it away and it becomes less equal, that's the reality.
It is a very ineffecient way of redistribution imo, and the side effect of improving the wealth of the voting landlord class, of which MPs are disproportionately in, is neither accidental nor desirable.
As I see it, the key thing about housing benefit/the housing component of UC - and the reason it exists as a separate benefit rather than being treated simply as a support to income which is what it is - is that the rate differs according to local housing costs. If you abolished it as a separate benefit you'd have to bump up UC otherwise people would starve - they'd still have to pay rent somewhere and it's not free anywhere. But you could set that at an amount that allows people to live only in the cheapest areas of the country. That would need to be higher than current rent levels in those areas because rents there would go up as eg Merthyr filled up with poor Londoners. In my opinion that would lead to worse outcomes than currently - landlords in Merthyr would be quids in apart from anything else as they reaped the capital gain - but as I understand it that is your proposal.
Not a treasury minister or civil servant so I don't really have a proposal as such, but yes would like to see housing benefit cut significantly (not eliminated, and could be done over several years to minimise transitional impact) and quite happy for that money to be spent on a mix of reducing UC taper, increasing UC and perhaps increasing the zero tax bands for income tax and NI instead.
The problem I have with this proposal is that it will exacerbate the difference between rich and poor areas and make communities less economically diverse. Eg where I live in SE London is a mixture of fairly expensive single family homes and private and socially rented flats. A lot of the lats are in properties that used to be single family homes and can be converted back into such. If people on low incomes weren't subsidised to live in our community then it would become a lot wealthier on average. Property prices might well go up as the area became more "exclusive". But as someone who values living in a diverse community it would be sad. I'm not sure it would be a net positive for there to be more areas with far higher concentrations of poor people living in them, out of sight and mind of the middle class, either.
I also live in London and lets not pretend that large parts of the population are not excluded from living in the more popular areas regardless.
If we take out those under 30ish as a special transitory case the better areas might be available to those in the top 20% of income/wealth and those in the bottom 20% supported by benefits. The middle 60% are already excluded.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Russia?
Well the Eastern Orthodox Church is basically the Roman Catholic Church just with a Patriarch not Pope and even more ornate ceremony
Okaaaayyyyyy....
I clearly missed that time the Catholics allowed lay clergy below the rank of bishop to marry.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage.
That's how it works in Germany. You can either make a bit of a do of the marriage registration, or you can quietly do the registration, then have a religious ceremony (or both). While the religious ceremony may be what people focus on, it has no meaning in the eyes of the law.
It can cause problems for some people in European countries who are married in the eyes of the State, but not in the eyes of the local church, in terms of employment, access to charitable services provided by the churches, and generally being viewed by people in places with big religious populations as "living in sin" or being married bigamously.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Yes but I wouldn't worry what a seemingly dwindling congregation (which is smaller than the membership) of the CoE thinks about the price of eggs.
You are at the bottom of the well looking at this.
In reality relatively few people care.
Pentecostals however are growing even in England and they are much more socially conservative than the C of E and good at attracting immigrant communities too.
Disestablish the C of E and most evangelicals in the C of E would become Pentecostal which would have more strength to push a harder line against gay marriage
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Russia?
Well the Eastern Orthodox Church is basically the Roman Catholic Church just with a Patriarch not Pope and even more ornate ceremony
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Which is likely happening in the next year or two anyway
Interesting. You think that the Synod will vote in favour of same sex marriage within a year or two?
I'm none too sure.
What about a wager on the matter?
Allowing it with flying Bishops not full endorsement
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Russia?
Well the Eastern Orthodox Church is basically the Roman Catholic Church just with a Patriarch not Pope and even more ornate ceremony
What nonsense you talk.
On social issues, women priests, homosexuality, abortion, divorce etc their views are identical
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage.
That's how it works in Germany. You can either make a bit of a do of the marriage registration, or you can quietly do the registration, then have a religious ceremony (or both). While the religious ceremony may be what people focus on, it has no meaning in the eyes of the law.
It can cause problems for some people in European countries who are married in the eyes of the State, but not in the eyes of the local church, in terms of employment, access to charitable services provided by the churches, and generally being viewed by people in places with big religious populations as "living in sin" or being married bigamously.
Our system is actually simpler.
I frankly cannot understand the objection to allowing pretty much anyone to be a registrar as long as (a) they are accredited by the government (b) they maintain proper records and submit them to a central register and (c) they follow the lawful procedures as set down by the government.
It's not as though it's just the CofE either. Any religious organisation can apply to hold weddings AIUI.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
Sounds like the answer is to let the C of E remain estbalished provided they OK gay marriage.
Which is likely happening in the next year or two anyway
Interesting. You think that the Synod will vote in favour of same sex marriage within a year or two?
I'm none too sure.
What about a wager on the matter?
Allowing it with flying Bishops not full endorsement
That is meaningless. The issue is CoE clergy conducting same sex marriages as a CoE marriage. It is illegal as it stands. And won't become legal until the General Synod decides in favour and changes Canon Law. Once Canon Law is changed then Statute Law will be changed accordingly.
Until then bishops can fly wherever they want but the CoE can't conduct same sex marriages.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Bizarre obsession with catholics overtaking CofE in the numbers game. It still won't make the Catholic Church a "national church". Nobody gives a monkeys.
Also fuck off with your fake concern about other denominations being even more homophobic than the CofE. "You've got to allow the CofE to carry on being homophobic or else we'll be even nastier".
Plenty of Christian denominations welcome same sex marriage, including, as far as I can tell, all the biggest protestant churches in other western European countries.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage.
That's how it works in Germany. You can either make a bit of a do of the marriage registration, or you can quietly do the registration, then have a religious ceremony (or both). While the religious ceremony may be what people focus on, it has no meaning in the eyes of the law.
The largest Church in Germany is now the Roman Catholic Church too
Perhaps someone can enlighten this uninformed American. A number of commenters have said that builders sometimes get "planning permissions" for a site -- and then don't do anything with the site for a long period of time. The commenters seem to be implying that this is a widespread problem.
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Obtaining planning permission increases the value of the land, and builders sometimes prefer to speculate that the value of the land will go up more so they wait rather than developing the property and selling it. Basically they are operating as land speculators rather than builders.
In a theoretical perfect market any builder who was laggardly about building on land for which they had permission would lose market share to builders who got on with it. But in this case there is such a shortage of suitable development land that the big developers can effectively block the proper functioning of a free market.
There's only really three options here. Either you dramatically increase the supply of land by abolishing planning controls, you break the stranglehold the developers have on the market by introducing the state as a serious competitor, or you do something radical with the principle of property ownership (like forcing developers to sell land at a heavy discount to the price they paid for it if not developed within a reasonable period of receiving planning permission, or making all developments involve multiple developers, competing to finish building first in the same area, somehow) to otherwise introduce more competition into the building market.
It could be possible to look at some sort of penalty or cost to holding land with unimplemented permissions, either directly through some sort of financial payment that has to be made to keep a permission alive, or by significantly shifting the planning rules so that if a plan isn't implemented any precedent value in it is lost.
If - as the government periodically tries to do - you remove most planning controls - that is no guarantee of a solution, if developers are holding onto prime sites that they own for internal or financial reasons.
Yes, perhaps. Though I worry that such attempts to regulate the market might unintentionally end up making the position of the big developers even stronger.
Your latter suggestion would decrease the supply of land for development even further - and that's the main reason that the market is distorted in the first place. Similarly, charging for land that has planning permission introduced a financial risk that large developers will be better able to handle.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I included removing planning controls as a possible solution (which I don't favour) to make the point that this is a situation created by market failure which has the shortage of land as a primary cause. It's not simply that the developers need to be regulated. The cause of the market failure needs to be addressed.
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Disestablish. Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage. Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who don't think much about what's right and what's wrong. I'll judge that on each issue.)
No because if the Church of England allows homosexual marriages by its priests then the moment you disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, which takes a much harder anti gay marriage line, almost certainly becomes the largest Christian church in England within a decade again.
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
But the Catholic Church doesn't become the national church, because: 1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly 2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Yes it does. In virtually every other nation where Christians are the majority or plurality religious group, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination. The only other exceptions are nations like Denmark where the Lutheran Church of Denmark is the established church or South Africa or Ghana where Pentecostal evangelical churches are the largest Christian group.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
Russia?
Well the Eastern Orthodox Church is basically the Roman Catholic Church just with a Patriarch not Pope and even more ornate ceremony
What nonsense you talk.
On social issues, women priests, homosexuality, abortion, divorce etc their views are identical
You'll be telling us next that Islam is basically like Roman Catholicism but with less statues and more domes.
Wouldn't your life be easier if you could bring yourself to admit it when you said something blatantly wrong?
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
Given a 2/3 majority for major change is needed in the House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity, I doubt there will be drastic change at Synod next month.
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
The problem, in my view, isn't a fusty church failing to reflect modern values. If Christian values (or values of any other religion) reflect the preferences of aj ineffable God, it seems unlikely to me that that God - who, if we are to believe the church, has been pretty anti-gay for tge last two millenia - has now changed his mind. What seems more likely is that the church doesn't really know, and never knew, what God thinks on any given subject, but knows what society thinks and is desperately trying to reflect that back. So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
Western society you mean. In most of Africa and Asia there is no legal homosexual marriage, same with most of Eastern Europe and Italy and in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia homosexuality is still illegal.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
But the church in those places is imply reflecting those societies' value back at it too. The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process. I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars. Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage.
That's how it works in Germany. You can either make a bit of a do of the marriage registration, or you can quietly do the registration, then have a religious ceremony (or both). While the religious ceremony may be what people focus on, it has no meaning in the eyes of the law.
The largest Church in Germany is now the Roman Catholic Church too
Only by a small margin - the numbers of Protestants and Catholics are still roughly equal. The most most striking change over the last decade is the large increase in people with no religious affiliation from 28% in 2011 to 42% in 2021.
Comments
Penny Mordaunt has urged Church of England bishops to allow gay marriage ahead of their historic vote, marking the first intervention by a cabinet minister on the issue.
Ms Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons and MP for Portsmouth North, has written to the Bishop of Portsmouth, calling on him to to “recognize the pain and trauma” that failure to recognise same-sex marriage causes to “many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second class citizens within our society”.
Currently, according to canon law, no Church of England minister can bless or marry gay couples. Ms Mordaunt’s interjection marks the first time that a serving cabinet secretary has called for the issue to be reformed within the Church of England. She also warned that if bishops failed to approve same-sex marriage, the issue would only “fester and detract” from any positive contribution from the institution.
Her comments also come as next month, bishops will present their long-awaited findings to the General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – on whether the ban on gay marriage could be overturned.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/16/penny-mordaunt-urges-church-england-allow-gay-marriages/
If the rich are going to consume more housing and have bigger homes, it will be through building extensions to their existing homes, not taking over social housing flats and ex council houses (unless to rent out) that are currently being occupied by those receiving housing benefit.
Also a covenant on the land prevents you ever applying for planning permission on that land, again.
https://twitter.com/ChildFreeBC/status/1614693141768187904/
The purpose of housing benefit/the housing component of UC is to make consumption (including of housing) more equal than the underlying income distribution allows for, take it away and it becomes less equal, that's the reality.
Make PP much easier to obtain, and give LAs financial incentives to allow more housebuilding in their area - something like central government doubling grants for five years, for new builds. In a perfect world, allow much more LA revenue to be raised locally rather than distributed centrally.
Whatever you do, don’t let local authorities own residential property. That gives them an ‘asset’ on their books, and every incentive to maximise the book value of such asset.
Central government should also be innovative behind the scenes, doing things like ensuring easy access to mortgages for modern pre-fab housing units and self-builders.
Always more likely than not- Autumn 2022 was Sunak's personal honeymoon, not one for the Conservative government.
Now he needs something special to avoid the fate of all new PMs.
Neighbors who saw a toddler in diapers wandering around a Beech Grove, Indiana, apartment complex with a loaded handgun called police. The incident was caught on building cameras. The father - who lied that he didn’t own a gun - was arrested.
https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1614727097616072706
Evangelicals will block full endorsement of homosexual marriage and liberals will block retaining only a biblical Old Testament, Pauline view of marriage as between a man and woman.
So as with women priests or divorcee marriage I expect a fudge.
Church of England priests who want to bless same sex couples marriages will be able to, those who don't won't be forced to.
There may even be more flying Bishops in the Church of England as there are now for Parishes which don't agree with women priests
They (the bishops or CofE clergy) will be able to bless whomever they want.
Should it be apparent that no intent existed to go beyond that point in the given time period, it does not matter; planning permission is retained long-term (judged thus in court with precedent being given from that).
It's very frustrating as a councillor, seeing such things happen and watching land be bought and sold "with planning permission" repeatedly over a period of several years. And, of course, up until recently, the fact no houses are put on such land does impact your five-year-land-supply, meaning that the less scrupulous developers can ignore whole swathes of the Local Plan and need for infrastructure and apply for permission pretty much anywhere.
And get any refusal overturned all-but-automatically due to no five year land supply. And then lock it in by digging a trench, buy and sell (etc), and between them, control the rate of building out to deliberately keep prices high.
Mind you, I wouldn't bet 2p against a court finding that the person controlling a corporate body was instituting proceedings if he caused that body to issue proceedings.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/16/metropolitan-police-officer-david-carrick-revealed-as-serial-rapist
...Now the reporting restrictions have been lifted, the Guardian can reveal part of the until now secret reason Cressida Dick was ousted as Met commissioner in February 2022 by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, was the Carrick scandal, as details emerged of his offending and possible Met errors...
String of allegations against him during his time on the force - and it wasn't the Met who finally caught him, but Hertforshire.
Which breeds NIMBYism. This is completely rational, if you see that planning permission for new houses DOESN'T bring down prices (as developers ration the building to keep them up), that developers get to make money hand over fist, and that obligations and conditions placed upon them turn out to be not worth the paper they're written on.
Row as report claims Sadiq Khan wrongly ousted Cressida Dick as Met chief
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/26/sadiq-khan-wrongly-ousted-cressida-dick-as-met-police-chief-draft-report
...The findings come from a special commission conducted by Sir Tom Winsor, the former chief inspector of constabulary, after Dick’s decision to resign in February.
A draft of the government-ordered report finds that Sadiq Khan did not follow due process and that Dick was unfairly treated, branding the mayor’s actions and decision-making as “irrational” and “unreasonable”.
A furious Khan is consulting lawyers, and believes the report to be biased and factually flawed. The report also says the mayor’s treatment of Dick was “oppressive”, and that she was placed under unfair pressure...
So the problem isn't that the church is wrong, it's that we listen to the church at all. We shouldn't be telling it what to think or do, we should be gently removing it from the decision-making process.
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5b2897a72c94e06b9e197ffe
2 corporate entities bring vexatious claims. Judge identifies Individual controlling both of them, makes him a party to the case, makes indemnity costs order against him and declares him vexatious litigant.
For those who are members of churches the position of that Church is significant. If the Church of England as the established church in England allows its clergy to conduct same sex marriage in England if they wish that will be a significant moment (Jesus for example never said anything against homosexual marriage)
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1102011/2022_08_24_-_Winsor_Commission_-_Report__TC_.pdf
...On 3 October 2021, an officer serving with the Metropolitan Police Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command was charged by the Hertfordshire Constabulary with rape after having been arrested the previous day. That evening, a call took place between the Mayor, the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime (Sophie Linden), the Commissioner, and the Deputy Commissioner (Sir Stephen House) to discuss the case...
Frankly, it's astonishing that Dick was allowed to continue as long as she did. The Home Office seem to have been determined not to notice how rotten the Met was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincial_episcopal_visitor
In Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder goes to Oxford he is told to steer clear of the Anglo Catholics as they are "all sodomites with unpleasant accents" so change of heart there apparently.
But reportedly the Met had received numerous complaints regarding him.
The problem is not that the church's - any church's views are 'wrong' - it is that the church doesn't have the insight it claims into what 'right' and 'wrong' are: the fact that its views are so mutable, and always seem to match the views of the society it operates within, suggest very strongly that it doesn't 'know' what God thinks, it is just winging it based on what it thinks society wants to hear. It is therefore adding no value to the decision making process.
I'm not saying religion should be abolished - I do think it has a value - but that value isn't to the decision making process. Those of us who don't believe should neither tell those who do what they should think, nor pay any mind to what churches think the 'right' course of action is - because they have no more insight than anyone else.
Wonder if Keir Starmer regrets this: https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/starmer-hands-his-solid-support-to-under-fire-met-police-commissioner
OK, assuming I understand the problem, why do builders do this? Why would builders invest time and money in getting these permisions, and then make no effort to earn some money from their investments?
Don't let religious organisations act as state registrars.
Obviously let people get married in any religious ceremony they want. Just make them go to the registry office afterwards if they want a state-registered marriage.
Of course churches should be allowed to say what they think is right and wrong. (And perhaps they do sometimes have more insight than those who rarely think about what's right and what's wrong. Some priests have much more moral sense than some estate agents, bankers, hedge fund managers, lawyers, quacks, and politicians. At least so I reckon. I'll judge that on each issue.)
So you could acquire agricultural land; do the legwork to obtain planning permission; get the permission then sell the land on to someone else for the new higher price
So you end up with an even harder line national Christian Church than you have now.
I also as a member of the Church of England would object to being forced to go to a registry office service I don't see as validating my marriage as well as the C of E service I do think validated it
1. Capital appreciation of the land. Land with planning permission being worth considerably more than land without, and the uplift being significantly more than the cost of the permissions process.
2. A wish to control the supply of new housing, to drip out new houses over a period of time, rather than release a large amount of housing one year and none the next. Dripping the housing out over time reduces supply (and therefore increases price) at any particular point in time.
1) If the CofE is any good, it will retain its numbers. And if it isn't, it doesn't deserve to stay as the 'national church'; but more importantly
2) in the scenario DJ41 describes, we don't have a national church at all. The secular majority simply stop listening to what the church say. The churches are free to say whatever they want, but the rest of us don't have to pay them any heed.
Do you object to registering the birth of your child in a registry office? If not, why would you object to registering your marriage? It only needs to be a 5 minute job telling the state about it. You can still celebrate it, properly, in as much depth as you consider appropriate, in a church, in front of your friends, family and God. A quick trip to Epping Registry office with your new wife when you return from honeymoon to fill in a form doesn't strike me as onerous.
Once granted a planning permission is a precedent - and even if it lapses after five years of no action, if permission is applied for again for the same land, previous permissions can be cited as precedent even if they have lapsed. Essentially, once you have got permission to build a block of flats somewhere, the precedent of development is established - and of course you can always try to get approval for a more intensive set of plans later if you wish.
For a larger developer, having a 'bank' of sites already with permission allows them to manage workflow, proceeding with developments as and when they wish, reflecting future changes in value and hence profitability.
Getting a permission now is also 'insurance' against future changes to planning policy, future changes in administration at the council, and future attitudes to house building.
As an example, right now it is relatively easy to get permission to convert retail or hospitality premises into residential, because in the aftermath of the pandemic and now with the cost of living crisis, the financial viability of many shops, restaurants and hotels is in doubt and hence their value as going concerns is depressed. Whether this will still be the case in five years' time, who can say?
There's only really three options here. Either you dramatically increase the supply of land by abolishing planning controls, you break the stranglehold the developers have on the market by introducing the state as a serious competitor, or you do something radical with the principle of property ownership (like forcing developers to sell land at a heavy discount to the price they paid for it if not developed within a reasonable period of receiving planning permission, or making all developments involve multiple developers, competing to finish building first in the same area, somehow) to otherwise introduce more competition into the building market.
If the Church of England was disestablished most of the Anglo Catholics would become Roman Catholic and most of the evangelicals would become Pentecostal or Baptist as is the case in the USA for example where the Episcopalian Church is a smaller largely liberal church with hardline evangelicals and Catholics pushing against abortion and gay marriage.
The latter of course means the Christian churches become increasingly pushing a political agenda and free of being established don't give a toss what the secular majority think. Indeed with immigrants tending to be more socially conservative Christians and Muslims too.
Signing a form to register your child is not the same as having to have a second baptism service at a registry office
That said, I can't find out how large that group is, so I'm not sure how unlikely the coincidence of the two cases is.
If - as the government periodically tries to do - you remove most planning controls - that is no guarantee of a solution, if developers are holding onto prime sites that they own for internal or financial reasons.
Then again, the Church of Wales has managed since 1920.
That didn't stop building, but it did eliminate most small builders. Large companies could afford to look ahead and have a "pipeline" of permits. And, it turned out, according to the study, that price competition mostly came from the small builders.
(Did the rules improve the environment? The article didn't say. But, as the years have gone by, I have been more and more supportive of improving the environment -- and more and more skeptical of most proposals to do so.)
You are at the bottom of the well looking at this.
In reality relatively few people care.
HarperCollins Publishers acquires memoir by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson
No publication date has yet been set.
🤑🤑
I'm none too sure.
What about a wager on the matter?
If we take out those under 30ish as a special transitory case the better areas might be available to those in the top 20% of income/wealth and those in the bottom 20% supported by benefits. The middle 60% are already excluded.
I clearly missed that time the Catholics allowed lay clergy below the rank of bishop to marry.
Our system is actually simpler.
Disestablish the C of E and most evangelicals in the C of E would become Pentecostal which would have more strength to push a harder line against gay marriage
It's not as though it's just the CofE either. Any religious organisation can apply to hold weddings AIUI.
Until then bishops can fly wherever they want but the CoE can't conduct same sex marriages.
Also fuck off with your fake concern about other denominations being even more homophobic than the CofE. "You've got to allow the CofE to carry on being homophobic or else we'll be even nastier".
Plenty of Christian denominations welcome same sex marriage, including, as far as I can tell, all the biggest protestant churches in other western European countries.
Your latter suggestion would decrease the supply of land for development even further - and that's the main reason that the market is distorted in the first place. Similarly, charging for land that has planning permission introduced a financial risk that large developers will be better able to handle.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I included removing planning controls as a possible solution (which I don't favour) to make the point that this is a situation created by market failure which has the shortage of land as a primary cause. It's not simply that the developers need to be regulated. The cause of the market failure needs to be addressed.
Wouldn't your life be easier if you could bring yourself to admit it when you said something blatantly wrong?